Create a Marketing List from an Imported List of Event AttendeesWithout Creating Duplicates

Create a Marketing List from an Imported List of Event AttendeesWithout Creating Duplicates

Here is a common scenario that many marketers face: You collect names and email addresses of people who have visited your booth at a trade show, or who have attended a live, in-person, event. Some of these people may already be in your CRM as a Lead, and some are new Leads, but you want to get them into a CRM marketing list so you can follow up with them. You don’t want to have to manually add them one by one, and there’s no easy way to check your list to see which ones are already in your CRM. And you don’t want to create duplicates of the Lead records if they are already in CRM.

This is a difficult scenario to address with CRM’s Data Import tools. But here is one trick to getting this done in a matter of minutes.

Create a temporary entity to hold your list. We have called ours “Imported Prospect”. To this entity, I have added three fields: – First Name (text) – Last Name (text) – Email Address (lookup to Lead entity – TIP: this is the important one!)

If you have collected the list of people who have visited your booth or attended your live event in a spreadsheet, save it as a CSV file.

Use the CRM Data Import Wizard to import your CSV file to the “Imported Prospect” entity. The trick here is that you will map the Email Address field to the Lead lookup:

a. Map your CSV file to your new entity “Imported Prospect”. Map the “Email” field to your custom lookup field that links to the Lead:

b. Map the “Topic” field from your CSV to the “Name” field on the “Imported Prospect” record, and map the First Name and Last Name fields to “First Name” and “Last Name”. Then, map the “Email” to your “Email Address (lookup)” field, which is the lookup that links the record to the Lead:

Run the import. This will result in new “Imported Prospect” records being created only for those records that already have a “Lead” in CRM:

On the “Import” record, click on “Failures” – you can export the failed records into a .txt file. These are people who visited your booth, but who were not in CRM already as Leads. We will come back to this list at the end:

Exporting the failures gives you a .txt file (We will come back to this at the end):

Use Advanced Find to locate Leads who have a related “Imported Prospect” record and add them to your marketing list:

Here are my Leads that got an associated “Imported Prospect” record created from my first import:

Next, import the failed.txt file directly to the “Leads” entity (not to your custom entity). From the “Import” record, you can add the new Leads directly to the marketing list:

Now my marketing list contains both the Leads who were already in CRM but who got a new “Imported Prospect” record imported and associated with them, as well as the Leads who really are new and hadn’t been in CRM previously.